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Invented a phone that does not need a battery

If you simplify your smartphone to the level of a simple communicator, excluding work with resource-intensive applications, then the most costly task will be the conversion of the analog signal to digital. That is, the radio waves in the letters, pictures and sounds in the dynamics so that the user can maintain a dialogue. But what if you abandon this process altogether?

In the prototype scheme of scientists from the University of Washington there is no room for batteries, this device does not consume energy at all. It is designed on the principle of a simple radio station, where the radio signal from the antenna is directly converted into acoustic vibrations, sound in the user’s earpiece. Conversely, a person’s speech turns into a radio signal and goes to the subscriber, so the work is possible only with “receive-send” cycles.

The highlight is that this prototype does not consume its energy to generate the outgoing signal, but uses the power of the reflected beam from the base communication station. To operate the internal circuits, still 3.5 microwatts are needed, which can be extracted from radio waves within a radius of 9 m or extracted through the solar panel. A photocell the size of a rice seed collects light from sources within a radius of 15 m.

At the output, we get a very weak, completely mobile and very passive-type passive-passive device. So far this is an experimental option, but scientists already see how to build on its basis cheap and useful emergency communication systems for Wi-Fi-routers . And for all other elements of the Internet of things too – even the ability to just ping one another without spending energy is expensive.

A major, fundamental minus of technology is that in the absence of a battery it is impossible to save up, store energy for large and long-term tasks. According to the data of Tehkult, the threshold of passive extraction of energy from the surrounding space without harm to communications does not exceed 10 microwatts. But Washington is confident that they will be able to develop such modules, which will suffice for these energy crashes, so that they can perform a wide range of useful work in a pulsed mode.

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